D.B. Cooper's cash from skyjacking sells for $37,000 at auction

DALLAS -- Twenty-eight years ago, a young boy camping with his family by the Columbia River came across a most-curious discovery: $5,880 worth of $20 bills.

Now, 15 of those bills -- part of the ransom given in the famed 1971 D.B. Cooper skyjacking -- have fetched $37,000 at an auction.

The proceeds, announced Friday, were two to three times higher than expected, according to Heritage Auction Galleries of Dallas, which conducted the live and online auction.

The bills are some of the only evidence from one of the Northwest's most enduring mysteries. In 1971, a man who identified himself as Dan Cooper -- later mistakenly changed to D.B. Cooper -- skyjacked a Northwest Orient flight from Portland to Seattle, claiming he had a bomb. He released the passengers at Seattle for $200,000, four parachutes and a flight to Mexico.

He then jumped out into the night with a parachute near the Oregon-Washington border and never was found.

It would take nine years, when then eight-year-old Brian Ingram discovered the money in the sand, for more evidence to emerge in the only unsolved hijacking in U.S. history.

The FBI verified the serial numbers of the bills and kept 13 of them. The Ingrams also gave some of the money to an insurance company that paid the ransom.

Ingram, now a father of five who lives in Mena, Ark., announced he would sell off some of the bills earlier this year.

Winning bidders paid about $6,500 each for two of the $20 bills. The money has the handwritten initials of investigators who examined the money when it was first found.